Random links with stuff about me

I gave a TEDx talk in Singapore in October 2013. The theme of the event was luck, so they had me talk about moral luck. I think people liked the example where a cannibal eats young Hitler and makes the world a better place.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Back in July 2004, when I was a grad student at UT-Austin, I started a blog called "The Ethical Werewolf". I wrote mostly about politics and philosophy, since that's most of what I spent my time thinking about, apart from smart ladies from various possible worlds. The blog unexpectedly propelled me into 2008 Democratic primary politics, thanks to interest from a bunch of smart young bloggers who are now superstar journalists at Vox. Later on, it basically became my academic homepage, with occasional posts outlining my travel plans and making silly philosophy jokes. I also wrote at a lot of other places with a lot of nice people, most notably at Donkeylicious with Nicholas Beaudrot.

I called the blog "The Ethical Werewolf" in part because I've always identified with helpful wolfy characters (Oz from Buffy, Perrin Aybara from Wheel of Time, and Remus Lupin from Harry Potter who is a role model for teaching). It also had to do with my views concerning moral motivation. David Brink once emailed me about why I gave my blog that name, and after making the Buffy / Harry Potter references, here's what I told him:

...I think humans have a lot more in common with the higher mammals, at least as far as the psychology of motivation is concerned, than most philosophers thinking about motivation allow. This is a basically Humean view -- we're all passion-driven, desire-belief-motivated creatures. The differences between humans and animals aren't to be found in the structure of motivation -- they concern other things like our capacity for abstract concepts which allows us to have a theory of mind, and how much working memory we have. Our motivational continuity with the animals is kind of werewolfy. I also think that if an animal had a strong desire to avert others' suffering and promote their pleasure, it would be a perfectly good example of a moral agent. And that's what I am -- a mostly-animal moral agent, or to be poetic, an ethical werewolf. (If I actually turned into a big powerful beast under the full moon and did socially beneficial deeds, that would be awesome, but unfortunately I haven't been bitten by the right person yet.)

Christine Korsgaard attacks a "picture of the virtuous human being as a sort of Good Dog, whose desires and inclinations have been so perfectly trained that he always does what he ought to do spontaneously and with tail-wagging cheerfulness and enthusiasm". But that's exactly the kind of animal I aspire to be! And I guess the ultimate Good Dog would be an Ethical Werewolf.

I still like the name, the view about motivation, and the fictional werewolves. But now I'm planning to start blogging again, I'm thinking it's best to set up an eponymous blog that's better integrated with my new academic homepage at neilsinhababu.com. So I'm putting this up as the final Ethical Werewolf post, and the first post at neilsinhababu.blogspot.com. If you're looking for the kinds of posts you used to see at The Ethical Werewolf ten years ago, that's the place to go!

There's a wacky story behind the paper. 2012 was my first time teaching intro epistemology, and I wanted a new Gettier case on the exam. So I modified the old stopped clock case so that the clock was running backwards, and asked the students what Nozick's truth-tracking view of knowledge said about it. I expected Nozick's view to correctly say that it wasn't knowledge. But as I graded, students showed me that Nozick's view incorrectly treated your belief about the time as knowledge! So I went back and re-graded all the papers I'd already graded. I was generous, because I'd messed it up too.

That would've been the end of it if my student Bernadette Chin hadn't talked about the case with his student Min Ying Lee, who discussed it with him. John (who teaches at Singapore Management University) emailed Weng Hong since he usually teaches epistemology, and then the message came to me. Soon John was telling me that he was abandoning Nozick's view because of the example, and I should write a paper on it! But I've never written anything about this, so I suggested co-authoring. To my surprise, he sent me a short Analysis-length version of the paper a few weeks later.

Two years later, we're revising this for our JPhil R&R and watching it cut through every analysis of knowledge we put in front of it. Every safety condition we've found in the literature is useless against this stupid clock! You can check it out and tell us what you think.

Section 1 has the backward clock example. Section 2 of the paper displays John's mastery of the literature; you'll see more of my handiwork in the basis-related stuff in section 3. When you're a young guy doing creative stuff outside your area, it's nice to have a co-author who published his first epistemology paper before you were born.

Friday, April 24, 2015

This July I'll visit my friends in the land of paraconsistent logic, kangaroos, and utilitarianism! Sydney with friend-colleague-roommate Ben Blumson for the AAP, and Canberra for ANU visitor season from July 12 to August 5. I just paid for an apartment so close to Coombs Hall that I could get lost in its hexagons on the way to the grocery store.

The fine-tuning argument says that since the physical constants are set at values that allow for nice life-permitting things like planets and carbon, God probably set them to make sure there would be intelligent life. I respond that intelligent life is possible even if the physical constants are set at values that don't allow for planets or carbon, if the laws about which physical things have minds are set in a much more mind-friendly way. Then maybe protons and electrons can fall in love with each other! This obviously requires minds to be metaphysically possible without big complex brains. But if the advocates of the fine-tuning argument are going to claim that God has a mind without even having a physical body, the door is wide open for proton-electron romance.

After writing the paper, I discovered Magnus Hyden's "Electrons in Love". It's good music for getting the feel of a world full of happy fundamental particles:

Saturday, January 24, 2015

From Piers Steel's 2007 paper, "The Nature of Procrastination": "Readers interested in the history of procrastination might seek a book by Ringenbach (1971), cited by Knaus (1979), but this search is not recommended. Aitken’s (1982) investigation revealed that the work was never actually written."

Apparently she discovered that Ringenbach, Knaus, and the publisher were trolling their entire field with a "Oh my book about procrastination? I never got around to writing it" joke.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

I've never figured out whether to be a Fregean or a Russellian about propositions, but Heidegger's view doesn't seem like a good alternative: "Let not propositions and ideas be the rules of your being. The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law." I have the standard empiricist worries about abstracta, but they're better than Hitler.

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Thanks to Jessica Berry for setting up my talk at Georgia State on Friday. It was wonderful talking with everyone about the psychology of moral judgment!

While I was hanging out with the grad students, we came up with a nickname for Stephen Stich and all his co-authors in experimental philosophy (like Nichols, Machery, Weinberg, and Nado): the X-Men. While Stich has to be Professor X, discussions of who is Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Magneto, etc., can now begin.

I'm optimistic that this will become the standard way to publish things by the time I'm an old guy. The internet exists, and it's the best way to share information. People should use it instead of shipping chunky pieces of processed wood pulp from continent to continent.